Flattley Guitar Pedals' DG Classic Fuzz is a really smart premium take on a Silicon Fuzz Face - with useful internal Ace Boost, and effectively 2-Band EQ

So what we have here is a 1968 Silicon Type II style Fuzz Face circuit - featuring premium quality metal can BC108 Transistors like the early Silicon generation of Arbiter Fuzz Faces.

The pedal of course has all those premium Flattley Platinum Series features too - the intricate 9-Step Metal Flake / Hydro-dipped finish, along with Laser-etched knobs, Halo LEDs, and branded footswitch topper. In its Día de Muertos Skulls livery / artwork edition it has the most wonderful 3D shimmer to it - which can really only be properly experienced up close and personal!

Flattley’s Paul has engineered some quite superb enhancements into this vintage inspired circuit - where his Flattley Ace Boost is internally incorporated into the circuit to maximise the output potential of the pedal.

You have your classic Fuzz Face controls - Volume and Fuzz (Gain), but with a couple of cool extras in the guise of a Tone pot, and a further Grunt control.

Note also that since the legends / labels are etched into the knobs - they are anchored to the 6 o’c position, so the usual pedal arc of 7 o’c to 5 o’c is brought back a notch to allow the knobs to line up in such a manner - this means that when the Volume is maxed out - it sits at 4 o’c!

There’s a truly vast range of tones to be found here, and the 4 knobs are incredibly interactive and give you the widest possible range of tones and textures. And while this is a Silicon variant - so doesn’t quite have the extreme guitar volume cleanup that the Germanium varieties do - it nevertheless has really impressive cleanup of its own accord - so you can easily fine-tune your gain level on-the-fly.

I tend to whack up the Volume - but am more careful with the Fuzz / Gain control as you can pile on too much Compression that way - and don’t necessarily get the ultimate harmonic content when that knob is maxed out.

So for my preferences I tend to have the Tone knob @ around 10 o’c, Fuzz between 1 and 2 o’c, Volume @ Max (4 o’c), and Grunt between 6 and 10 o’c. My most common setting is 10 - 2 - 4 - 10.

The two Tone controls are really interesting in that the main / top Tone control makes things brighter as you dial clockwise - seemingly adding Treble but simultaneously reducing some of the low-end. The Grunt control, which is part of the circuit’s buffer then allows you to dial in progressively more low-end. So the Tone Pot is fairly fixed for me at around 10 o’c, while if I want the pedal fully searing I dial the Grunt right back, while it’s usually at around 10 o’c to nicely balance what’s set on the Tone control. They don’t exactly work the conventional way - but you can kind of consider them as a kind of 2-Band EQ - where the upper one makes the output brighter, and the lower one makes it fatter and bassier.

When you see so many 2-knob Fuzz Faces out there - this one is a proper revelation - giving you much more from that really expressive circuit. You can really fine tune your output to a level that is pretty much impossible to achieve on any other similar Fuzz Face pedal. So the Grunt / Input Gain / Low end control - can be really handy in defining all manner of more subtle fuzzy-drive tones.

As a Silicon Fuzz this is not as sensitive as Germanium variants - but I still got the best results with this near the front of the chain. It’s one of the cleverest takes out there on the Silicon Fuzz Face - and actually really easy to dial in and fine-tune.

Available right now from the Flattley Guitar Pedals Webstore for £259 - and at leading International Dealers.